Child restraint systems for use in automobiles have been designed to include a variety of features. Many of these features relate to either improved safety or securing of the seat or increased convenience and ease of use of the child restraint system. Specifically, one area of focus within the relevant market is the anchoring mechanism used to secure the child restraint system in a vehicle. Another common feature in child restraint systems is the ability to recline the seat relative to the vehicle seat upon which it rests. Despite an abundance and variety of child restraint systems available on the market, there is still significant room for improvement in the areas of safety and convenience.
Many child restraint systems utilize the vehicle restraint belt to anchor the child restraint system into the vehicle. Typically, both the shoulder belt and lap belt of the vehicle restrain system are routed together through openings in the base of the child restraint system to anchor it into the vehicle. These vehicle seat belt routing systems suffer from several disadvantages. First, the vehicle seat belt must be routed through an opening, which makes installation difficult and time consuming. It is often hard to correctly route the vehicle seat belts when the child restraint system is positioned within the vehicle since the belt path is on the rear of the child restraint system base. Second, the location of the anchor point on the child restraint system in such routing systems is low on the child restraint system, and therefore does not provide optimum performance and resistance against movement of the seat.
Many child restraint systems are also provided with a recline feature, which allows the seat to be reclined relative to the vehicle seat that it sits on. This feature can be important because many vehicle seats are angled to provide a comfortable seating surface for an adult passenger. Therefore, in order to orient the child restraint system in the proper position, it may be necessary to adjust how far the seat is reclined relative to the base. Conventional child restraint systems include reclining mechanisms that require that the seat be removed from the vehicle before adjustments to the recline mechanism can be made. This is problematic in that it requires the removal of the anchoring system and, once the recline mechanism of the seat has been adjusted, reinsertion of the car seat into the vehicle. As discussed above, removing and installing the child restraint system can be difficult and time consuming, making the adjustment of the recline feature also difficult and time consuming.
Thus, the need exists for a child restraint system that alleviates one or more of these deficiencies of the prior art.